Matthew Applegate, akaPixelh8
, is a leading light of the "chiptune" scene - music made using
vintage home computers.
Now he is embarking on his most ambitious project to date,
holding two concerts consisting of music made on some of the oldest
and rarest computers in the world at the UK's
National Museum of Computing at
Bletchley Park, the
second world war code-breaking centre.
This article first appeared on
New Scientist.com. Its
editor Sumit Paul-Choudhury
talked to Matthew Applegate ahead of the performances of his
show, called Obsolete?
How did you get into this music?
I was in an REM covers band in the late 1990s, and the Amiga 500
I used to do our orchestration was fairly limited - it came out
sounding like chiptunes. By comparison, modern PCs using samples
have always sounded to me like they were trying too hard. They just
didn't sound right.
When I realised that you could emulate old machines on a PC and
learn what was going on inside them, I went back to the older
sounds. I've designed instruments for pop stars. I reprogrammed
Game Boys for UK artist Damon Albarn, for example, turning them
into real musical instruments.
I grew out of the home computers and started to use scientific
machines. With Obsolete? I've gone right back to the beginning of
what computers can do in terms of sound. It's not just about sound
chips, but the electromechanical sounds they make: the fans, the
tape readers, the teleprinters - crunchy sounds.
What kind of music is it?
I usually do my own weird version of pop music in one-off songs,
but this is a lot more elaborate. It's a concert work - a complete
study of Bletchley Park, its history and its people, and of
mathematics and code-breaking.
There are hidden codes and themes of encryption within the
music. For example, I created a rhythm on
the Colossus
[the world's first programmable electronic computer].
The Colossus was used to break wartime codes: the Nazis
enciphered Morse code messages by adding a second layer of Morse on
top. I think of Morse codes as rhythms, so the piece has multiple
rhythms overlaid.
There is also one piece of music where I'm going to put the date
of the concert into a hand-wound adding machine and turn the
handle. As it turns it will make a rhythm for that particular
night. But it's not going to come out as some sort of strict
mathematical, avant-garde modern music. It does have all these
things in it, but it's still music.
How do you turn primitive computer sounds into
music?
I make chiptune music and I do
circuit-bending,
too. Chiptunes are about reprogramming old computers and using
their sound chips to make new music. I've had to learn all the
relevant computer languages from the 1970s to 1994. In fact, the
best chiptune musicians are programmers.
Circuit-bending is taking an electronic device and
short-circuiting it to create completely different outcomes to
whatever it would originally have done.
I think the people at Bletchley Park were expecting me to just
make pop music using the sounds of the machines, but that would
trivialise it. The museum curators initially took a little
persuading because some of the machines are worth, say, £4 million,
and I have blown up machines in the past. But I promised to be
sensible with them. I'm using samples in the performances, because
there's no way I could use all the machines - they wouldn't let me
move them. But some of them will be live.
Who are your musical inspirations?
I don't actually listen to chiptune music. My inspiration is
really people like Marvin Gaye. For this piece, though, I've gone
to 20th-century composers such as Schönberg, Bartok and Cage, to
see how they explore themes.
What's next?
There are a few individual machines I'd like to work with. One
is the
Whirlwind from
1951, arguably the first computer to produce sound. I'd also
like to do more projects like Obsolete?, but in different areas,
such as using machines that have a specific function - in
astronomy, say. I got everybody scared when I said I'd like to work
on strategic nuclear defence machines.
I got everybody scared when I said I'd like to work on strategic
nuclear defence machines